The Acetylene gas may be the type of light that will work in your story.
The Acetylene process was invented by a Canadian, Thomas Leopold Willson in 1892. Willson also invented the idea of generating Acetylene inside a buoy in 1904. Acetylene is also sometimes called Dalen gas. When Acetylene is employed in lighthouse work, the gas is either supplied in cylinders, or is generated on the spot.

An acetylene gas lamp was installed at the Cloch lighthouse, in Scotland around 1900, and the acetylene was used to operate everything from the domestic lighting, fog signals and the engine house to the lighthouse lamp itself. In America, a beacon equipped with a generator for producing acetylene gas from calcium carbide was placed in the Mobile Channel in 1902, and this was the first official use of acetylene gas by the American Lighthouse Service. Compressed acetylene was first officially used at Jones Rocks Beacon, Connecticut, and South Hook Beacon, Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1903.

The American Lighthouse Service chose the type that generated on the spot, the Willson carbide-water buoy design rather than the more popular pressurized acetone cylinder type. In the Willson buoy the gas was made on the spot by sliding solid calcium carbide through a canvas chute into a fuel chamber in what was known as the ‘charging process’. This process was very dangerous and in 1913 an explosion occurred when refilling such an acetylene chamber in a buoy on the tender Hibiscus. Later, America abandoned the Willson design and began using pressurized cylinders throughout the American Lighthouse Service.

Since Acetylene was used in the early 1900's in a well known lighthouse like the Sandy Hook and the self generating Acetylene Gas pushed to extremes pressures to create more light could be explosive and I think this may be the lighting design to use.